


Light Without Effulgence

by Opacifica



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Extensive Discussion Of Complacency Of The Learned, Gen, Homestuck Proper Compliant, Jake And Rose Are Friends, Realistically Nothing This Cathartic Happened For Either Of Them Before The Epilogues, This Is Just A Jake Rose Friendship Manifesto And That's All
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-19
Updated: 2020-08-19
Packaged: 2021-03-06 03:00:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25986289
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Opacifica/pseuds/Opacifica
Summary: The God of Hope and his currently-off-again boyfriend's ectodaughter walk into a mutual friend's recently acquired ski lodge. Writer's block, mom issues, discussion of complicated relationships, and Complacency of the Learned are on the agenda. Both are liars. Both are surely beyond redemption.Neither entirely deserves the things they believe about themselves.
Relationships: Jake English & Rose Lalonde
Comments: 12
Kudos: 104





	Light Without Effulgence

While the slopes just outside of the magnificent ski lodge are heaped generously with white powder, it’s not quite winter yet; the effect is owed to a sentry-like row of snow machines that came with the property. Some of the thick groves of trees that dot the mountainside are still dappled orange, red, and yellow, their leaves not yet fully lost to autumn.

Birthdays, everyone seems to agree, after the most recent incident this past spring, may not be the best way to handle big annual get-togethers. For once, it wasn’t a decision made on your account. Back then, after all, you and Dirk were still doing your happy-relationship dance, and everything was fine and dandy on your end. You must admit, it was nice, being Dirk’s problem and no one else’s, letting the rest of your friend group have a turn at being the public-consumption trainwrecks for a little while.

Nice, but not permanent. Kind of a shame, putting the kibosh on things three weeks before the long-planned vacation, but. Well. You’re not going to say he was wrong to do it. There are extra rooms in the hulking chalet, so Jane was able to be accommodating of the fact that you and your _former_ paramour, current deeply-awkward-friend-and-business-partner, would not be sleeping together this go-around. And she didn’t make so much as a lick of fuss about the matter whatsoever, thank fuck.

But it’s not as though you could just skip out. That’s precisely the issue that a non-birthday, low-stakes get-together hundreds of miles from the flashbulbs of the paparazzi was supposed to ameliorate: John not showing up for his own party. Supposed to be shared with Jane, except not in practice, on account of his absence. Everything went to pot from there, Jane fighting back tears at the planned photo-op, Jade disappearing to retrieve the missing attendee-of-honor and conspicuously never returning, a multi-car pile-up comedy of errors from there. Somehow it all kept getting worse, and nothing anyone said to Jane was helping, and everything kept tanking the situation into hitherto unexplored territory of _awfulness_.

It would be selfish not to attend. Double-selfish to do anything to ruin anyone’s completely normal fun. Selfish-times-a-million.

If you weren’t sure he’s expecting it of you, you’d consider taking up drinking again. But you figure you’ll have to hold off until you have plausible deniability. It can’t be because of _him_ , or heavens forbid, _his breaking up with you_.

Again.

Jane has purchased this big, beautiful, very-very private lodge in the middle of nowhere for the purpose of these get-togethers, but despite the repurposing as a family retreat, it still has sort of a commercial look to it. The hallways feel just a little like hotel hallways, uniform and sterile despite the pretty hardwood floors and homey decoration. It’s a careful, reproducible kind of homey, the sort in Hallmark movies with white heterosexual human couples wearing, respectively, red and green sweaters on the front. They all sort of have the same set, and it might as well be here.

The main living-room sort of place is positively cavernous, with massive full-wall windows overlooking the slopes, a dining area that would easily fit three times your number that probably used to be part of a little restaurant-type thing, a cozy assemblage of easy chairs and couches positioned around a grand fireplace on one wall, and in the center, an ornately carved and extensively stocked bar.

Vacant, now. Unreasonably tempting. You would kill for a distraction from the way you feel like a fucking ghost, floating around while everyone else does fun normal family bonding activities that you would wreck with your presence. Even Karkat and Kanaya have some sort of pseudofamilial moirailship, which is the quadrant you find most incomprehensible.

A fire burns in the hearth, fortunately shifting your attention away from the gleam of silvery snow-filtered light on the surface of the bottles behind the barlike setup that must have been inherited with the chalet.

You’re not alone, but you wonder if this is really such a step up.

Surely no one has ever made use of a couch as ridiculously and yet elegantly as Rose does. She occupies the entirety of the cushiony surface, designed for three, despite being easily the smallest Strilonde, an inch or two shorter than Dirk, even in heels, much to her apparent distaste.

At present, she balances her laptop precariously on one knee, suspended over her face, leaning back over one of the padded arms, one hand tossed carelessly behind her, the other bolstering her head, while her free leg sprawls over the remainder of the furniture, making it very clear that no one ought to try to join her.

Well, you’re bored out of your skull and not willing to make yourself any more miserable than you have to be through self-imposed isolation. She will just have to deal with your intrusion, and you stand up, imbued with great purpose, to join her by the fire.

Most of what you know about her is periphery. You don’t really talk to anyone but Jade and Roxy, outside of events like this, except for Dirk, obviously, because you work with him and sometimes fuck him and also sometimes are dating. All temporary states. Nothing ever gets to be permanent with you, not for very long.

That’s fine, you suppose, now that you understand and recognize and accept it. Operating under the delusion that you _could_ just be stable and normal and domestic-bliss-y without going tits up every few months when you get… bored, or antsy, or just… you don’t know, you have no business speculating when all your speculation ever adds up to is self-apologetic lies. But that’s where the trouble is, when you expect things to be some unrealistic way and then they inevitably prove not to be. It’s fine once you circle back to the conclusion that you just aren’t built to be anything long-term to anyone but maybe Jade, who refuses to just let you slip away. 

It would be unfair to ask her to be anything more to you than she already is, and you get it, anyway, you’ve quite come to terms with the fact that you will just have to scrabble around for shreds of comfort and normalcy for as long as you live. You’ll never have the permanence of your gran and you, safe and alone and sheltered and _forever_ on your island, again.

Never had it in the first place, seeing as she got all murdered that one time. Really interrupts the delusion of anything good hanging around for too long.

Many people, you suspect, probably feel more or less the same. At least, imagining that they do makes you feel a little less atrocious about it all.

Rose is, you think, probably the most unlike you of anyone to come out of the game alive. From what you gather, she is basically like Dirk, except a woman, and capable of being happy. Normal, y’know, and almost superhumanly comfortable-looking, using the couch like someone with only the vaguest notion of what a couch is for and not a care in the world. You notice, as you approach, that a mug of hot chocolate sits, untouched, on the coffee table.

Kanaya probably brought it over for her. Gracious sakes, has it been… three years since their wedding? The second they were both eighteen, Kanaya’s wriggling day, like a couple of Hollywood-perfect high school sweethearts. That was a - that was a real day and a half, what with all the... but the whole thing with the ceremony, the start, that was beautiful and perfect. 

You’ve long since given up being jealous about it.

“Is this occupied?” you ask, indicating a matching recliner positioned a little further from the fire, beside the couch that Rose has positively colonized.

She extends her leg experimentally, as though to test whether she could get her foot onto the seat without sacrificing her position sprawled across the furniture like a chiropractor’s nightmare. Her laptop wobbles dangerously from its precarious position on her knee, but doesn’t fall.

“I’m afraid not,” she finally says, retracting her leg with a touch of a sardonic smile. “Be my guest.”

“Thank you kindly,” you say, with as much sincere politesse as you can muster.

From this angle, as you fiddle with the recliner, you can see her frown illuminated doubly by both the flickering orange flames in the fireplace and the blue glow of her laptop. She’s not looking at you at all, but at the screen, her neck craned just enough to narrow her eyes directly at whatever she’s doing.

“What are you working on, if I might ask?”

“Writing,” she says.

You haven’t seen her hands move in quite some time, let alone touch the keyboard.

“Ah,” you say. “Are you terribly busy with it?”

“Yes.”

Well, you’re familiar enough with what that sort of tone means, though not quite in her precise voice. Close enough. 

Earlier this week, you and Jade had a nice time cutting firewood for everybody, and you try to squint at the split logs currently charring black beneath the mantle and remember if any of them were from your logs. Neither of you is especially adept with an axe, but Jade nudged John into showing you how to do it without throwing out your back, he gave a several minute demonstration of ‘how not to be an enormous idiot doofus piece of shit while swinging a hunk of metal on a stick’, and you actually haven’t seen him since.

Could that have been three days ago? You don’t think he was with the big crew rolling out to ski, led by Davejadekat, joined at the hip. Dirk even somehow got Jane to go out with him and Roxy, despite fairly vocal protests on her part. Actually, that’s a very good thing, that they’re all hanging out together, and you aren’t imagining them telling unflattering stories about you and laughing in mutual disdain at all. What more would there be to tell, really, that they haven’t collectively witnessed for themselves?

You make a sincere effort to dissolve into the recliner. This is all so very stupid. You probably should have skipped this iteration of the reunion. It’s no fun when you’re in the off-again phase of things with him, especially this time, when you’re basically ‘off-again’ friends with everyone _else_ in attendance, at the moment.

That’s your own fault. You assumed that Roxy would side with Dirk on the matter of… the stuff he said this go-around while you were snapping at each other and moving your things around in such a way that you wouldn’t have to look at each other outside of the show. They usually side with him on most things, even if it’s just in the super-subtle, casual, “I totes get it, Jakey, but I guess I feel like we could be a little more sympathetic about this whole deal? Not that I don’t _believe_ you, it’s just real fuckin hard to imagine he feels any better about saying that stuff than you do about hearing it, right? Look, we were shooting the shit the other night, and he said -”

They really think that sort of thing is helpful, somehow. Or more likely just can’t stand hearing you say shitty things about someone they love ‘totally just as much’ as they love you, which is Roxy-shorthand for Dirk is their favorite. They could rationalize anything Dirk or Jane ever did or said as totally acceptable, and you suppose you should be grateful that this willingness to indulge… well, you should just be grateful that they haven’t cut you out for being more of a bitch than all your other friends combined. Sometimes it feels like they’re the only person you can talk to at all about certain stuff, so it’s just… so they bear the brunt of your unflattering, overly-candid ranting bullshit. They would be entitled to be avoiding you, not wanting to hear your latest list of things that are shitty about dating _or not-dating_ Dirk, it _all_ seems so unbearably shitty from where you’re standing, so you’ve been cutting out the middle man and avoiding them first.

Jade is even easier to evade. From your wood-chopping conversation, you know that things have been going phenomenally well for her, that she’s delighted to be hanging out with Davekat again and that they’ve been fairly amenable to her presence, after such a long absence bouncing around Troll Kingdom medical schools and facilitating fascinating study into comparative anatomy and medicine on behalf of all sentient species. She probably hadn’t heard about your nonsense yet, so you skated around the issue, and by the time Dave no doubt mentioned that both you and Dirk were acting rather single and, in your case, phenomenally sulky about it, you were already switch-flipped into Normal Casual Conversation Mode, as you usually do around patrons and donors and investors and whatnot, less so your family.

It sure works, though. Someone looking to gain sincere insight into your mental state, when you are doing your Normal Smile and trotting out a stable full of Normal Conversational Topics might as well interrogate a brick wall for all they’re likely to suss out any information about you but what you want them to know.

Rose sighs and reshuffles herself about on the couch, her laptop now resting across her chest and her legs stretched out at a forty-five degree angle, one hiked up over the back of the couch, the other coming to rest across the cushions once more. She still hasn’t touched the keyboard, even to scroll or poke around or like, tweet or whatever she might do to distract herself from the light boring a hole in her eyes.

“How goes the writing?” you ask politely, when the awkward silence becomes overwhelming and demands interruption.

“Atrociously.”

“May I ask why? Legitimately, I have fuckall else to do, and sometimes Dirk finds it helpful to talk about these sorts of things out loud,” you say, then mentally kick yourself for bringing Dirk into things, because now she’s looking away from her screen and at you with mild interest.

Her mild interest face is exactly the same as _his_ mild interest face, and you don’t like realizing that one little bit.

“Perhaps,” she says. “I don’t suppose that’s worked out very well for him, though, has it. Is that show of yours scripted?”

“Loosely,” you say, your face feeling warm and your chest feeling a little tight at her casual acknowledgement of how things are. “For the first few episodes, we wrote it all out, then ad-libbed over it. More recently, we play it by ear. The, er, raps, though, those are all pre-written.”

“I find the raps delightful,” she notes. “Dave, however, loathes them, and I’m afraid my only regular opportunities to tune in fall during my visits with him and the additional bodily appendage he calls a roommate.”

“Of course he would,” you sigh, “half of them are circuitously making fun of him. I mean, one can’t rhyme a phrase on television without calling to mind the early Earth C texts, most of which he wrote in something roughly resembling meter and several of which he performed for the carapacian forebears, these being among the earliest preserved instances of filmography. Any graduate of Earth C’s school system is intimately familiar with his work. It’s devastatingly easy to parody as a result.”

“I’m well aware of the satirical business model of my father’s show, Jake. You don’t need to give me the pitch. I’m already thoroughly bought-in to any enterprise that operates at my beloved brother’s expense.”

It’s _your_ show too, technically, in the sense that it wouldn’t exist without you, though not in the sense that you really own it or participate in it, these days, beyond showing up roughly around call time and getting in front of the cameras and hamming when you are supposed to ham, which you do enjoy, really, that much is true. But you don’t own it, and you quit managing the social media a few months back to spite him, which you weren’t technically being paid to do, anyway, isn’t that just wildly exploitative of him? And the only veto power you have is threatening to stop showing up, which makes it hard to throw your weight around without making empty promises.

You _wouldn’t_ actually stop showing up, so such declarations are, by nature, hollow. If you permanently tapped out, you would have literally nothing else to regularly fill your time, and you’re not sure what that would do to you. You aren’t eager to find out, either.

“Hah, well, I can’t claim that’s completely deliberate. More of a side effect, really. Dirk would be positively cataplectic if Dave expressed any such sentiment to him, though I’m not sure either of them is capable of raising a word of criticism to the other outside of elaborate jokes that leave no one the wiser as to what anyone involved actually thinks or feels.”

“Unfortunately, I think you may be correct about that. Regardless, I appreciate the artistry and intentionality that seems to go into the sordid, sanguineous, perspiration-soaked spectacle of testosterone-fueled debauchery.”

“Ah, thank you! Though I guess it’s not really _my_ artistry to thank you for complimenting, when it comes down to it,” you say, biting back a sigh. “In the spirit of full disclosure. I clock in, say some funny words, do a funny dance, and consensually beat up my ex, and then I clock out. Surely there’s nothing in that worth discussing over your present case of writer’s block, hm?”

“I take great umbrage at the implication that any block, writer’s or otherwise, could stop me even temporarily,” she says, just the slightest brushstroke of a laugh in her expression. Still distracted from her laptop, still looking at you, which you don’t mind at all, just - just so long as she’s not making the kinds of faces he makes.

“Then by all means, get on with your tippytapping, far be it from my prerogative to blunder into a gentlewoman’s way as she pens the next great Earth C novel.”

She pauses, the set of her mouth changing, tightening up to one side as her brow furrows. This is more of a Roxy face. This seeing of your friends in their ectoprogeny never fails to unsettle you. In Jade, you can barely clock it, because she is your gran before she is anything to do with you and Jane, but you worry that this is why you struggle so much to look John in the eye for longer than is strictly necessary. Too much Jane-and-you, too much an instantiation of something you really just don’t think about at all unless you are directly reminded, because you have bigger problems, these days.

It works out fine, though, because he doesn’t seem to like making eye contact with you, much, either.

“It’s a sequel,” she says, after a moment.

“To _Complacency_?” you ask. You’re a perfectly good conversationalist, possibly better at it when you are not entirely present in your words.

“Of course. My shelves are metaphorically lined with unfinished works in progress. _Complacency_ being the only one I’ve yet managed to complete, the designation as ‘sequel’ might have been a tip-off.”

On Earth C, at least in the various online social circles you lurk about in, to kill time, _Complacency of the Learned_ is recognized as the sort of tome one carries on the subway to project an air of high culture. Dirk’s copy has a bookmark on page twenty-six, and you have literally never seen him move it, though he insists on packing it with him when you travel for business, on the off-chance that the opportunity arises to read.

Your gran used to love it. Thought the series was about the best thing since sliced bread.

It’s popular, even more so here in this new world. The subject of a great many memes about books that might credibly be used for murder weapons, doorstops, or bragging rights. The TV Tropes page, before you got to it, was woefully inadequate. All self-aggrandizement and navel-gazing, very dry. One is more likely to find actual insight on the page for RUMBLE IN DA PUMPKIN PATCH itself, since at least, you gather, people tend to pay attention while they’re watching it, enough to dig for intertextuality and meaning when they manage to tune in without a hand down their trousers.

“Well, spiffing!” you say. “Clever, to build up finishing-things momentum with something easy and familiar and then turn that inertia to other works.”

“It certainly _would_ be a clever idea, if it were working.”

You sigh. “Of course. My sincerest apologies for the interruption.”

The careful pyramid of split logs in the fireplace tumbles into an untidy heap with a shower of ash and sparks. She glances over, then back at you.

“Apologies of my own are due. I’m not ideal company, I’m sure.”

“Not at all!” you insist, which is a lie, but you’re not sure how. There simply is no ideal company. Not even total solitude sounds survivable, at the moment. Jade would ask questions. Roxy would ask questions. Dirk would ignore you in stone-cold silence, sucking the light and the warmth from the room with his disapproval. It feels so horrible to think that he is out there, disapproving of you. That they all surely are, in one way or another.

The only thing that could be worse would be them sitting around and doing it here. Rose is a relatively neutral party, at least, because you don’t care all that much what she thinks of you, so long as it’s not desperately terrible, so long as it doesn’t get back to Dirk in one way or another.

“Mm,” she says, her canted eyebrow immensely disbelieving, though she doesn’t ask a follow up question.

“I’d have stayed in my room if I didn’t want company, I daresay,” you add, trying to will that brow down a notch or two into more credulous territory.

“The slopes are veritably overrun with _company_. I’m sincerely curious, Jake, to what do I owe this happenstance?”

“You've hit the nail on the head. Happenstance,” you say. “I’m sure the gossip machine has reached you by now about my present… well. You know. There is absolutely no way that you don’t know. I have it on good authority, as a matter of fact, that you know everything.”

“You’ve broken up with my father before, and you did your brooding over the event, if there was any to be had, quite privately, as I recall.”

You sigh again, louder.

“More quietly, too,” she notes.

“He broke up with me this go around,” you say shortly.

“Does that make three times, now, in total?”

“I don’t see what reason you’d have to care.”

“I don’t see why you’d choose that overstuffed abomination over the rest of the atrocious furniture in the lodge, and yet, you did, and here we are.”

“Fine. Truly, I am sorry for having done so, but at this point, the blasted chair is devouring me,” you complain, and that’s the truth, it would almost be more trouble than it’s worth to get up, there isn’t any lumbar support to this thing at all. Though the scales will shift if she keeps probing at you. At some point, loneliness always becomes preferable to agony. You’re good at being alone.

“A tragic yet literarily poignant fate.”

“Oh, spare me, mine shall hardly be the fate of Executus the Vigilant,” you snort. “There’s no irony to a death by hubris for a fellow so diametrically inhubristic as myself. You’ll have to do at least one or two notches better if you want to earn an impact to my demise. And this is hardly Lady Kalathea’s Seat of Seeing, and the only one who was harmed in its procurement was presumably Jane, who was ripped off by whoever sold her the thing.”

You worry for a second that you’ve said something wrong. Her head tilts, and her eyes narrow curiously into a slow and inscrutable blink.

“I’ve read the Wikipedia article,” you continue hastily. “Fairly dry, I mean, but It’s hard enough to keep up with Dirk’s references as it is.”

“I wrote the Wikipedia article.”

“Oh, whoops, sorry, don’t mean to cast aspersions on the thing, really, it’s not the point of them to be captivating or especially insightful,” you say, shrugging, because you kind of don’t care that much about where your aspersions actually land, but you don’t want to seem like a horrible person.

“I didn’t mention the origins of the chair.”

Now it’s your turn to blink slowly and try to process through a sudden blue screen, the inevitable dial-up-connection buzz-screech that hits when you’re caught in a lie.

“Dirk must’ve mentioned it -” you say, scrambling a little for words.

“He hasn’t read my book. But you have.”

You can feel the window to flee slamming shut entirely. Rose closes the lid of her laptop, her dark eyes glimmering with interest.

“My gran read it to me when I was a child,” you tell her, after a second. “She was head over heels for - just, well, she adored the work, thought it was just the cat’s pajamas, as it were. Filled a few weeks of bedtime stories, that’s for sure. I just wanted to see if it was the same.”

“Was it?”

“No, I don’t think so.” You didn’t remember the version your gran declaimed in funny voices, one for each character, being quite so _angry_. Acerbic, certainly. Self-referential, and rather self-loathingly so. “But then again, it was a very long time ago. There were all those sequels, too, but mainly just… expanding the universe, as I recall, before Calmasis’ fall, and one from after Kalathea mended the curtain with the unbreakable thread spun of their lifeblood. I could’ve been getting it mixed up, they were quite tonally different.”

“The publications of my self from this Earth have been lost,” Rose says. “Or I might have an easier time plagiarizing them.”

You laugh, and the sound is unfamiliar with disuse. “That’s a shame, isn’t it? They were actually very good, though I’d much rather some innovative take on a sequel than more lateral movement through the rather fucked up universe and its horrors. D’you have an idea to start out with? I mean, even if you don’t, I wasn’t kidding about being a pretty good sounding board for workshopping things. Dirk refuses to make use of the Hope thing, because then he’d have to admit it’s real, but I’ve helped Jade with an awful lot of her papers.”

“Ah. Hope.”

“Yep, that’s the one,” you say, shrugging into the pillowy surface of the chair.

She places her laptop down on the fine rug, the first truly delicate and careful movement you’ve seen her make, and shifts around in the couch to face you in earnest, propping herself up on her stomach, her chin balanced on her crossed arms on the nearest armrest. Reaching distance. Her eyes look orange in the illumination afforded by the flames, but that’s the way with the Strilondes and their mirrorlike black irises, everywhere but the sunlight.

Rose’s face has a way of catching the light, too, easier to see with her a little closer. High cheekbones, and an equally prominent jaw, a proud brow. The orange-red-yellow washed over her brown skin gives her the look of a vengeful goddess dug up from inside of a volcano, somehow, despite her expression, her eyes molten with curiosity rather than anger. 

She doesn’t look _that_ much like Dirk, actually, from this perspective. While their features are similar, his face is less severe. Softer, but that’s not saying much. She has Roxy’s eyes, though. Almost exactly. Wide-set, dark-fringed with thick lashes and deceptively lovely.

“I don’t think much about hope, of late,” Rose says, and you realize, with a start, that she’s been applying equal or greater scrutiny to you.

You wonder, a little, who she’s looking for and what she sees. Jade, who would be your source of insight on all things Rose, rarely talks about her, and when she does, you get the sense that she’d rather not be, that there’s not much especially pleasant there to tell. So you take it easy on the subject, and you remain rather in the dark about exactly what must have transpired. Surely, something, but nothing worth speaking aloud.

“You’re not missing out on much,” you say, with a small smile.

“Amn’t I?”

“It hasn’t been much of a boon to me, thus far, I must confess. Not very practical in the day-to-day, unless you have need of a nightlight and you catch me in high spirits. Makes camping with Jade a little more fun and environmentally sustainable, I s’pose,” you snort.

Her lips purse together. You are, rather conspicuously, not glowing at all. You haven’t in a while. The syrup-thick tension of trying to hold yourself together, to not trod clumsily over anything without Dirk around to be a leash, to not make an utter fool of yourself, constantly, all the time, which you are really quite talented at doing, lest he - lest _everyone_ figure out how little you are without him - it’s put a damper on things.

“Everyone who’s actually read _Complacency_ has a favorite Disciple,” she notes. “Yours is Kalathea.”

You blink owlishly, not having expected that.

“Well, sure, but whose wouldn’t? Of all the Disciples, I mean, she’s the most tolerable by a longshot.”

“See, Light isn’t always useful, either. I know only what I _can_ know from the ambient information available to me. There are limits to the light. Not all can be illuminated at once. Half the earth is always shrouded in shadow. ‘Day’, and ‘truth’, are thus subjective judgements, fomented from what is already known, what can be seen from a perspective limited by one’s own exiguous self.”

“You _were_ correct, though, I mean, she _is_ my favorite. I thought her thing with Calmasis was quite sweet, actually, until all that stuff happened, but up till then, it was really fabulously romantic. My gran did the best voice for her.”

And she cried, at the part of the book where Kalathea dies. The acolyte of Zazzerpan himself, she had less raw power, but more tools to wield it, than Calmasis, who had been relegated to the instruction of Frigglish. She was always suspect to them, for her abilities, and for her past allegiance to the man who they believed to be the cause of all their suffering.

It was only a small matter for Zazzerpan to convince Calmasis, playing on their fear, their conviction in their own skepticism, that Kalathea had betrayed them.

“Have you ever thought about adapting _Complacency_ for film?” you suggest. “It really is a good story. More people might enjoy it if it weren’t so long and so… demanding, I mean.”

Not everyone has a grandmother to answer questions about, well, then, how come Calmasis couldn’t just use the temporal-warping abilities they acquired when they flayed Tervarin the Temerarious alive to go back and right things and un-murder her, and to explain that actually, the story is told non-chronologically in some places, and Calmasis and Kalathea never actually coexist in the text, she just happens to linger as a haunting afterimage, not that it’s obvious to the reader until after they find out she’s been dead all along, and gosh, that’s just the beginning of the textual mindgames.

It would be challenging to turn such a nonlinear story into a different medium, you suppose, but you’re inclined to think it could be done.

“I _have_ thought it over, but exclusively in an unfavorable and dismissive manner.”

“But suppose you had full creative control, no one to muck it up? Let’s be realistic, here, Dave would throw money at your feet to do with as you wished. Probably even if there wasn’t a movie involved. And more to the point, I really think if there were an easier means of, well, accessing the story, you’d have a captivated audience of billions on your hands. It’s just… forgive me, Rose, but the book is rather a slog. One really has to _want_ to read it, and want to like it, moreover.”

“I prefer it that way.”

“Well,” you say after a long pause. “That sounds very lonely and a little sad to me, if you’ll pardon my frankness.”

“People don’t often have cause to pardon your frankness, do they. I wonder what qualifies me to be the rare and fortunate beneficiary of your sincere opinion.”

You snort out a very involuntary laugh, then forcibly slot your teeth as close together as they’ll go to avoid saying anything else stupid and overfamiliar and totally insensible.

The fire continues to flicker distractingly beneath the ornate mantle. The sun sets by late afternoon in this strange ski-chalet-valley-whatever the fuck, even in early November, only minimal ambient grey light filtering into the cavernous living-room-bar-dining-hall, most of it coming directly from the hearth, now.

“Pardon _my_ frankness, Jake, but I don’t imagine you’d have any personal insight as to what happens when one makes oneself… consumable, now, would you?”

“I can’t say I have so much as an inkling what you could mean by that,” you sniff, trying to shift away in the seat, though you don’t have anywhere to slither off to, or any excuse to balk at the taste of your own medicine, really.

“I would rather they choke on me and find me grotesque and indecipherable than eat me alive.”

You look down at your hands, and beneath them, your current laying-around-sweatshorts.

“I still… am not seeing your point, I’m afraid,” you tell your lap, still feeling her watching your face, hoping the reflection of the fire on your glasses might at least obscure the cast of your gaze, just a little. Those Striders are onto something, as a matter of fact, with their dark-lensed spectacles.

“Of course not. You would never trouble yourself with such thoughts, and I imagine you enjoyed _Complacency_ because it’s such a lighthearted romp of a story, so easily digested by people who have never tasted suffering and indignity and longed for retribution.”

“Don’t flatter yourself too much, there, it’s just a book,” you say, a little too sharply, a little too hurt in a way that you don’t want to express. “I read a lot of books, difficult though that may be to believe, and they’re all more or less the same to me.”

“Ah, right, your waxing and waning illiteracy.”

“Exactly,” you sigh. “I grew up on an island, remember? I can’t be expected to…”

The whole thing suddenly feels stupid and exhausting, and Rose’s scrutiny is no less intense, and all of your sore spots, at the moment, the ones on the insidey bits if not the bumps and bruises from the most recent episode of RUMBLE IN DA PUMPKIN PATCH, all feel exquisitely rubbed raw. With an anguished huff, you run your fingers through your hair.

“Was it a uniquely unpleasant breakup?” Rose asks, after an agonizingly long moment. “His brooding never makes it especially obvious. The tenor is unchanged regardless of external stimulus.”

“Yes,” you say shortly. “It rather was, I think.”

Nobody threw anything at anyone, or anything of that nature, but he poked at you enough to get you really - you slipped, said just a little too much, and you really, knowingly hurt him, on purpose. So easily that it must have been premeditated. You’d been thinking about it - you always think about it, before you speak, whether what you’re mulling over will be painful for him to hear.

So there’s no excuse. You knew exactly where the tender spots were, and it’s not even like he was the first to hit below the belt, you just couldn’t stand his acting like he knew your inside-thoughts better than you do, really, he was the one trying to get a rise out of you.

He just about said you were stupid. Not in as many words, but close enough. He knows you hate that, how much it means that he’s the only one who even _sometimes_ thinks you aren’t, and… and… it wasn’t fair, at all. He just makes you feel so cruel and capricious and if he only knew how his feelings matter so much more to you than yours, how your accidentally hurting him because you can’t _read his friggin’ mind_ is a knife between your ribs, and he wields it like one, too, how careless and just fucking moronic you can be.

And he lies, he says he’s fine with things that he isn’t fine with. He treats you like a child whose feelings he’s protecting, when really, it’s the other way ‘round, _he’s_ the one acting like a child, but when you say that suddenly you’re the utter shambling monster who’s never even loved him anyway, acts like a drooling, doped-up dipshit led around on a leash half the time and a fucking hostage the other half of the time, and what are you even supposed to say to that, when he says those things about you as though they’re _true_?

It’s just the dumbest fucking dance. He wants you to be the one to pull the trigger and do the breaking-up, so he pushes, and he pushes, and you push back, because you want it to be on his hands, not yours. And the tug-of-war winds up a bloodbath, and no one gets out clean.

But it was him, you won this time, and you should feel a little better about it for that pyrrhic victory. But you don’t, at all.

“I’m sorry.”

“Golly, thanks. I feel better already,” you say.

“For what little it’s worth, I do understand.”

“Little indeed,” you huff. You rather think she’s bullshitting you on the subject, _pitying_ you, and you don’t have a lot of patience for it. You don’t mind pity much, it has its uses, but hers doesn’t seem to prevent her from needling at you. So it is effectively worthless. “You’re not at all comforting, Rose, has anyone ever told you that? And furthermore, your sympathy is awful rich, coming from the happily married woman, I’ll have you know.”

“Rich, to be sure. But as we love the same insufferable man, and inhabit the same unendurably bleak world, I might have cause to think that there could be sufficient common ground to for us to find some consolation in each other’s company.”

“I’m not very comforting either, or so I’ve been told, repeatedly and at escalating volume,” you concede, slumping back into your seat. “It’s not really so bad, though, Earth C.”

“Isn’t it? Sometimes I think it might be driving me quite insane.”

“All the same,” you say. “There are worse ways to live than this one. I can be very confident in saying that. Even at the worst, everyone is still alive, here, and, y’know, so long as there is life and all, at least a little hope persists. That things might get better someday.”

You’ve lived without hope before. And you’re not without it now, either. Jade will dance her way back in, her soft ears and mass of dark, curly hair snow-damp. She’ll regale your with stories of her misadventures on the slopes, and you’ll feel better, because you love her, and she’s like you in some ways, and her being happy means there’s still a shot for you. Maybe she’d like to roast some marshmallows this evening.

Jade is good at quietly coexisting with you. If you could just surgically excise the rest of the people present, for a few hours, you could have some relief from the wound-up dark-coiled thing weighing down your chest. You may not have Dirk anymore, for however long this lasts, but you can latch onto her side like a limpet and suck some of the happiness out of her, usually, when you need to.

You try not to do it too much, not to over-rely on her, lest you blunder up that most sacrosanct of relationships. She’s cautious with you, too, with what she asks of you, so it’s only fair that you reciprocate the care.

“It helps,” you add, “to have people. Just as much as it hurts, sometimes, it also helps. Love and all, thorny as it is.”

The platitude feels rather hollow. Dirk _did_ tell you to quit fucking saying that particular word if you’re doing it at emotional knifepoint, and you _did_ suggest he might hear it rather less often, then, and that was the core of all the worst of the… stuff that was said.

“Sometimes I wonder about the sufficiency of love.”

“How tragic, what with the superabundance you seem to receive,” you say, reminded, unwillingly, that Dirk will certainly not think any worse of you for being a little rude to his ectodaughter. There are ceilings to the amount of hatred one person can feel for another, and you don’t think this should make a dent.

She ignores your aside.

“Some say we look for the love we were denied as children, though I find that approach rather reductive. It obfuscates the fundamental nature of attachment, familial as well as romantic. What is love, after all, but consolation, comfort, being… held, if not necessarily understood? An infant monkey in a cold wire cage will starve itself rather than surrender the comfort of a warm but milkless mother of chickenwire and soft fabric. There are needs that run deeper than the id. Love may be necessary, but alone, it can’t sustain us. We die clinging to a false idol that cannot feed us any more than it can truly love us back.”

You shudder at the thought, wondering at what kind of cruel experiment might have come up with that data, not much liking the idea at all, nor the thought of yourself, young and petrified and weeping, huddled up in your gran’s arms, which weren’t stiff quite yet, her body still a little warm.

“Roxy was your mother,” you note, as an afterthought, actually wondering for the first time what that might have been like. You struggle to think of them as anything resembling maternal, but perhaps that’s mere short-sightedness on your part. They’ve always seemed to like the idea of a child well enough, though that’s contrasted with Dirk’s utter revulsion at the prospect. The interest seems mild in comparison. “And all this monologuing is well and good, but I’m actually waiting on your ‘muh muh I understand’ explanation, Miss Licensed Wedded Wife.”

“Yes.” Rose laughs harshly. “Roxy was my mother, in a sense. And definitionally, that would be Missus Licensed Wedded Wife. If you’re going to make the joke, commit to it. I have no patience for slapdash mockery.”

“Your _wife_ adores you. Always eyeing you up like she’s waiting for the sun to start shining out of your ass,” you complain. “And I can’t say I have any idea why.”

“Sometimes I wonder, myself.”

“I’m sorry,” you say, when you realize she’s not going to tack a witty rejoinder on to the end of that. “I don’t mean to - I suppose that’s not fair of me. You are a fine looking woman, and clearly of sharp wit and sound mind, and I am glad that you have found contentment with your chosen spouse.”

“You do sound a little like a procedurally generated condolences card when you attempt to be sincere,” she observes.

“And you wouldn’t be out of place in a Bryan Fuller series. Remind me not to try the meat at your table,” you snap back.

“I think we’ve gotten off on the wrong foot,” Rose says. “At some point in all of this.”

“Well, there’s scarcely any footing at all to set a precedent, despite the… good gracious, the five friggin’ years we’ve all been coexisting on this planet,” you reply. “I don’t think you like me very much, Rose, which is fine by me, honestly, I’m actually perfectly content with some people not liking me.”

“I don’t dislike you.”

“Shocker of the century,” you grumble.

“I harbor no specific antipathy towards you whatsoever. Hope players have always stymied my attempts to understand them, or even to care to do so, though, as I say that, I concede that I only have one fully developed frame of reference.”

“Huh? What’s wrong with Hope?”

“It obfuscates my sight. The tendency of the Light is, as I’ve said, to know what is known, to narrow down a field of illumination to a spotlight on the correct answer. Hope, the tendency of which is to propagate the unknowable, unforeseeable, and incoherent, represents a rather devastating confounding factor.”

“Oh,” you say. “Whoops.”

“It’s not a personal indictment. You’re correct. I don’t know you.”

“But you knew - you did know I liked Kalathea best. That’s not nothing.”

“While not a universal favorite, most people who’ve actually read _Complacency_ find her more far more sympathetic than Calmasis. This was by design. I did not create them to be forgiven on my behalf.”

“How about Kanaya? Which does she like?”

Rose shuts her mouth with an audible click of teeth.

“Oh,” you say.

“You did mention an atrocious, painful, and distractingly interesting breakup. Since I have you here, shall we stick our fingers into the open wound a little? The stakes are low, after all. My father would behead himself a thousand thousand times before he would willingly confide in me, or I in him, in any but the vaguest and most circuitously figurative of terms. It’s a very normal relationship to have with one’s parents, in my experience.”

“Fine, then, Missus Psychowhosiewhatsits, try this on for size,” you say, with a grimace. “The only reason he’s oh-so hellaciously skittish about my getting bored of his company is because _he_ gets bored of _me_. Where the hell else would that specific gripe come from? And then everything gets turned upside down when he figures out that’s why everything I do makes him snip at me. Because I don’t think he can admit that he finds the vast majority of my interests _pedestrian_ , and he wouldn’t like me at all, really, if we were together twenty-four-seven and the novelty had time to wear off and he thought for two fucking seconds about what I am without, you know, the pleasant distraction of a warm body and a pretty face, alright? D’you know the kind of eggshells I walk on, Rose, to keep him from figuring out that I’m not worth liking? It’s exhausting! But he can’t just be honest with himself and come the fuck out with it and say it. That the more he understands me the less he likes me. I can feel it. I can _feel it_ happening, and you can’t possibly know what that’s like.”

Rose blinks.

“Well, does he?”

“Huh? What, now?”

“Does he bore you.”

“I don’t think there’s a soul in existence that couldn’t bore me,” you say, feeling exhausted and defeated and low as the belly of a scum-slick water moccasin. “But that’s not the point of love. I’m not with him for nonstop laughs, dinner and a show and poignant philosophical insights to boot. That’s dime-a-dozen. Or I wasn’t, y’know, when I was… with him. He makes me feel normal. I can keep myself entertained with an internet connection and a few seasons of _The_ friggin _Simpsons_ to start fights over online, but I can’t make myself normal for anyone else, because I don’t really give much of a shit about anyone else? No, that’s a lie, I do, it’s just… different. I could fly off to the Human Kingdom and go on a killing spree in broad daylight, guns blazing, and I don’t think it would change anyone’s opinion of me. Jane would write it off as some momentary psychotic lapse and probably make me see a neurologist, but would do her very best to cosset me all the way, Roxy would make sad little faces at me until I said I was very, _very_ sorry, Jade would be a little weird about it, but she’s already a little weird about me, just in the background, did she ever get to telling you about the version of me she knew? Never mind that. Dollars to mcfucking donuts, my _fans_ would find a way to like me more for it. Dirk’s the only reason I don’t… there are so many things I sometimes think I might want to do, horrible horrible horrible things, Rose, it’s inescapable, I _know_ I could do it and I know I could get away with it, too, if I wanted to enough, could have a go at the worst things a person could do and wish it undone and never face a lick of a consequence. I could actually make you do anything I wanted. I could make you think you loved me, just for funsies. I just think it would… I know he thinks I’m better than that sort of insane stuff. And I don’t want to ruin that for him, thinking well of me, if not as a paramour, as a person. Everyone else can rot, in the end, at least so far as their moral judgements go - as if any of _them_ has a right to judge _me_.”

A log falls in the fireplace with another shower of brilliant orange sparks and a brief whiff of ash and burning things swept into the massive living room rather than up the chimney where it belongs. As usual, you feel very stupid for talking about yourself. At best, you just told her the truth, which is that you think you may need Dirk, not to entertain you, but to keep you… accountable. You need _someone_ at any rate, because you can’t imagine doing it for yourself. Can’t imagine holding anyone to anything. Slippery as a handful of jell-o, and it’s twice as bad when it’s _you_.

At worst, all of that was just another series of self-indulgent self-loathing rubbish, a massive pile of lies with nothing at the center, voiced for the pleasure of hearing yourself prattle.

Which, well, it’s been a while since anyone listened in on your solo self-flagellation sessions, so you suppose the witness, at least, is nice, even if you’ve just dumped a whole hell of a lot on someone you don’t even know too well.

“That probably makes it all make sense,” you sigh, wishing you could make yourself small in the overstuffed recliner, but unable to do so when your legs hang off the end of the thing at full-stretch. “I guess I’m not built for a relationship. Sometimes I still think I ought to pack up and disappear to the middle of nowhere and never bother anyone again. None of this would be an issue if I’d just leave everyone alone and stop making them party to my abject nonsense.”

“By all means, catastrophize some more,” she finally says.

“I’m not catastrophizing,” you insist. “I’m normal phizing. This is phizing justified by evidence. I’m just not doing love the way everyone else is and it gums everything up into an inextricable muddle and I should just set up shop at the bottom of the ocean until everyone forgets I exist, which is a _normal thing to say_.”

“I can’t honestly say that I relate to that, in its entirety,” Rose notes, after a second, “but that doesn’t make your situation incomprehensible, or at all impossible to palliate.”

“Sure, alright,” you say doubtfully.

“Love is complicated. You don’t have a monopoly on even this particular complex approach to it.”

“Did Freud say that?”

“No, I imagine he’d suggest that the gun in your hypothetical rampage represents a penis, and phallic violence against the castrated man, which is, of course, my recurrently headless father, and your friends are also penises, and your isolation is, in reality, a castration allegory of your own. Anxiety concerning your capacity for such violence, manifested as psychosocial removal of the organ from the body, the self from the society.”

“That’s… not very helpful,” you sigh. “Remarkably unhelpful.”

“I know. You did ask, though.”

“My mistake. No Freud, then, unless you can - golly, if I never hear anyone say the word ‘penis’ again, I daresay it’ll be too soon.”

“That’s a shame, as all of my advice was genital-based in nature.”

You snort, and bite down on a smile.

“Come on, then, love is complicated. I’m sure you were onto something there.”

“Well, now you’ve put me on the spot,” she says, the laughter in her expression easing to a thin smile of her own. “I was going to make a dialogue of it. If I had an easy answer, I would have shared it already. I try not to be miserly about such things.”

She props herself up on an elbow, rolling over to cast her gaze towards the massive window stretching across the wall of the lodge.

“I used to dream of a way out of a silent, loveless home. I created worlds out of the only kind of justice I could imagine, into which I could escape. I’m not certain I ever learned how to love without killing myself to prove it. Certainly no one ever bothered to teach me.”

“But that’s… that’s good, Rose. You get to come up with the answer yourself, then, isn’t that what you light-y fellows are all about?”

“That’s a first. My undemonstrative and neglectful childhood, my greatest strength.”

“Perhaps I wouldn’t go that far,” you amend, wincing a little. But also knowing how it can be, even with your Roxy, who you love so much. “But there _are_ ways to spin these things.”

“And none more adept at looking on the brighter side of a tank of raw sewage than yourself, I suppose.”

“I like to think it’s one of my best qualities. Plucky, some have been known to say.”

“Mm.”

Rose rolls over again, staring at the ceiling, now.

“Calmasis killed themself. That from their corpse, Kalathea might rise and mend the veil they tore, which had shielded the Complacency from the light of the divine. Rather than replacing the veil, she made, of their blood and of their body, a curtain that the curious could part, to gaze upon the terrible glories of the Truth, and through which the Truth, in measured doses, could be tempered by the falsehoods that give life meaning, that, through this, become true. That a resolution between them might be reached on the stage she crafted of their bones, that reality and artifice could coexist without one violating or destroying the other.”

You hold your silence.

“I agonized over the ending for months. Calmasis had to die. Their crimes were unforgivable. To live, to exist had been agony for them since they dared to tear the veil and look upon the truth, seeking power, finding it in the objective, in what _is_ , in the brutality of death and unfairness and the domination of the very power they had sought. When they looked past the veil, they saw their own ignoble death, their cruelty, their shame. They saw it every time they closed their eyes. Their repentance, and their service to the world they had nearly destroyed in totality, was to protect it, to allow those who survived to do what they could not. Their inability to make use of their knowledge without corruption was not a human failing. It was their _personal_ failing, for all it can be easy to confuse the two, and where they failed, through their failure, others would succeed. No person wakes into the same world twice, and this would be a kinder world.”

Slowly, you nod along with her. Rose has a low, resonant tenor of a voice, gone hauntingly clear and certain as she speaks.

“I’m not a pessimist, Jake. My work has been called misanthropic by people who haven’t read or understood it. I don’t believe the worst of people as a whole, truly. I couldn’t, not having known Kanaya, having known… back when I was writing _Complacency_ , having known… people are mostly good. Capable of great abnegation, sacrifice, kindness. I’m the one who isn’t.”

“Are we not talking about my relationship struggles anymore, then?” you suggest, and she laughs without humor. “No, I jest. That’s rather a lot to unpack, Rose.”

“I’m aware.”

“So, er, how _does_ one write a sequel to such a thing, really? I did like the ending. I thought it quite fitting, very fair. Kalathea the Curtain-Keeper, Stewardess of the Divine Light, some very nice titles, and the guarantee that none would ever face the truth alone. A very satisfying epilogue, that.”

“The whole ‘day-by-day dialectical resolution to matters of harsh reality versus comforting story in a brave new world’ outcome sounds blissful and complete, until one is living in it.”

“Ah,” you say.

“It doesn’t make me want to write, though. It makes me want to drink.”

“‘Ah’ again, and make mine a double,” you sigh, which makes her laugh.

“But she believes I’m better than that. They all do. And so I won’t,” she says, flopping further back, draping her body over the arm of the sofa until she’s looking at you, upside-down. “I wasn’t lying when I said I understood. On some level, at least. Alas, I don’t think that makes me an especially helpful counselor, unless one is solely looking for commiseration.”

“Commiseration is worth a lot more than you might think,” you say. “Honestly, it’s just nice to talk to someone. I sometimes forget I’m allowed to do that. Without it being a whole thing.”

“Don’t tell me my timeless approach to therapy was a successful one.”

“What, you mean mostly ignoring what I said and monologuing about your own problems?”

“That would be the one.”

“Actually, I’m pretty sure the castration analogy was what did the trick.”

She closes her eyes and smiles an upside-down, oddly catlike smile.

“Also, Rose, y’know… for what it’s worth. This was, I think, a kind thing for you to do.”

The corner of her mouth tugs in one direction or another as she opens her eyes again. It’s hard to keep track when she’s all flipped about.

“That’s the most tragic thing I’ve ever heard. Someone having a by all accounts fairly self-indulgent conversation with you is not an act of kindness. You are completely delusional.”

“That’s nothing I’ve never heard before, believe you me,” you say. “D’you want to see what’s stocked in that bar that’s nonalcoholic enough to preserve our sense of moral superiority over our past selves and various parties that may or may not sit in judgement of our conduct?”

“I do make a mean virgin bloody mary.”

“You have to drink mine if it’s vile,” you tell her, groaning like a very old man as you try to reach the little lever thingy to get yourself out of the horrifically squishy chair, struggling for a few seconds before you give up and just hover yourself free, as Rose sits up and watches with an elegantly raised eyebrow. “I prefer apple juice in a serious-looking lowball tumbler thingummy. Trick is, I don’t really like the stuff, so I can sip a glass and make faces all night with no one the wiser.”

“Jake English, you’re an unrepentant liar,” she says, faux-scandalized.

“Make me a disgusting tomato juice beverage, then, and drink one with me, if you consider yourself such a low and deplorable thing,” you suggest. “Put it in perspective, Rose. Lay yourself in the mud with me and embrace it, and I think you’ll find I’m no better, at very least. The truth does fester when it’s never told. My gran used to say so.”

“As a great philosopher once wrote, presumably with knowledge in excess of my own, ‘better out than in, I always say’.”

In a very gentlemanly gesture, you offer her your hand with a little head-dippy half bow, and she takes it in her own. She has very pretty hands, her nails well kept and unchewed, her fingers delicately tapered despite the strength of her grip. As you pass, you scoop a deck of cards left unattended on the corner of the pool table.

“D’you play gin, Rose?”

“Only if you don’t mind losing.”

“Oh, I mind. But I wouldn’t worry about that. Even Jade won’t play with me, on account of Hope being such a potent tool for cheating at cards.”

“Luckily for you, I’m a betting woman. And Light, I think you’ll find, is more than a match.”

“It’s _extremely_ on. House rules demand maximum cheating. Like the Olympics if athletes were simply allowed to use all the drugs they wanted, really see what humans are capable of!”

Rose doesn’t independently glow, even as you hop behind the bar and start handing her various juices and seasonings and vegetables from a fridge, excited by the prospect of creating some truly repulsive combinations of tomato juice and whatever else is available. You figure it works differently for her; it’s like she absorbs it, just a little, when you start to go hazy and white-gold around the edges for the first time in weeks.

And she does clean your clock at cards. It’s not even a fair matchup for the first several rounds, until you figure out how to interfere with _her_ interference with your shuffling, at which point it becomes a little more even. And you chat mindlessly like neither of you said any of the things you spilled by the fireplace.

By the time that all of your friends come trundling in, the fire is burned down to coals, all the lights in the lodge are blazing, and both of you have eaten all the celery in the cooler under the bar. It still stings, of course, like a red-hot knife in the gut, how Dirk deliberately disappears with Rox and Janey without a glance your way, like he has a sixth fucking sense for where you are and is disgusted by the idea of existing in an enclosed space with you.

But Kanaya and Karkat join you, and he’s not so bad, with her toning him down and without Dave to egg him on. And you and Rose delightedly serve them the worst drinks you came up with - horseradish, one part lemon juice, one part bitters, and two parts Coke.

They both love it, and eagerly join in with your drink-projects, creating improbably _worse_ combinations. Jade and Dave abandon the pool table to get in on the raucous good time. You flick snowmelt from her ears and she clambers over the bar to help you serve and Rose blushes red as the flower for which she’s named as Jade teasingly comes up with drinks for her, sips directly from a bottle of Everclear, and flirts shamelessly with both her and Kanaya. Even John is eventually roused from wherever he’s holed himself up by Rose playing some kind of death metal playlist loudly enough to shake the foundations of the lodge, and Jade forcibly hauls him into the space behind the circular bar setup so he can’t easily escape.

If he hates you - if any of them hate you - you sure can’t tell.

Even Rose, who knows you, now, musters up a smile that rings sincere as you retreat to your room to shower and get some shuteye. It is still very bad. Some things are still very bad, certainly, some things about you broken, some relationships beyond repair, some looming obligations terrifying and untenable. Some truths defy the succor of a happy ending, and will still be there when you wake up tomorrow.

But your face hurts from smiling, and that’s its own sort of truth.


End file.
